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Saturday, March 8, 2014

An Amazing, Awesome Blog

“You use the word ‘amazing’ to
describe a goddamn sandwich at Wendy’s? What’s going to happen on your wedding
day, or when your first child is born? How will you describe it? You already
wasted ‘amazing’ on a fucking sandwich.”

Louis C. K.

How do
you describe paradise?

All St.
Paul could say was: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard …”

But when
visitors to my Vieques B&B first look out at the expanse of Caribbean Sea
before them, it might as well be a sandwich: Amazing! … Awesome!I hate
to sound like a whiner, but the overuse of amazing
and awesome is making me mad as
hell.

“I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

Huffington Post Blogger Phillip Goldberg points
out that the song "Amazing Grace" works because its composer
experienced a transcendent experience. “Amazin' Mets” was an appropriate
nickname because the original team was shockingly awful and because the 1969
squad stunned the world by winning the World Series.

But
Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is not amazing
-- even though its commercials say it is.

What bothers me most? Amazing and awesome are
indiscriminately applied by people who should know better – advertising copywriters.

These
are the people who are supposed to understand that if everything is amazing, then nothing is amazing.

These
are the people who are supposed to know that the root word, awe, carries connotations of fear and
dread.

Advertising Age, the industry’s version of Variety, printed this headline:

“Can BBDO Make Bud Light
Advertising Awesome Again?”

And venerable old Readers Digest:

“13+ Amazing Uses for WD-40”

All of
it cannot be amazing. All cannot be awesome. Instead, it’s all become nonsense.

But there’s
nothing, really, that I can do about it beyond begging you, as Peter Finch did
in the 1976 movie, Network, to “get
up right now, go to your windows and stick your head out and yell 'I'm as mad
as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!’”